Founded in 2014 by engineers from Google, Facebook, Oracle, enterprise startup Rubrik has developed the world’s first Cloud Data Management platform for data protection, search, analytics, archival and copy data management for hybrid-cloud enterprises.

Rubrik's architecture not only enables safety of secondary data but it provides access to dynamic application data almost saved like a timeline for faster access and enterprise decision making. The company has created a lot of IP. Their funding now stands at USD 290 million, after closing series D. Its bookings are approaching $100M run-rate in just 6 quarters of selling.

Sneha Jha caught up with Bipul Sinha, Co-founder & CEO of Rubrik during his recent visit to India to discuss how Rubrik’s growth story is unfolding.

Let's start off by helping CIOs understand what Rubrik does. How did you come up with the idea of founding the startup? As an enterprise startup, what is the problem you have set out to solve?We are a three -year- old startup based in Palo Alto. Founded by former Google, Facebook and Oracle engineers, Rubrik is a new-gen converged data management provider that aims to replace conventional storage.

Rubrik helps enterprises bring their static data to life. Fundamentally, Rubrik does away with all the point products (backup server, backup proxies, replication, accelerators, deduplication, disk storage, tape, off-site storage) that are necessarily involved in conventional backup and recovery systems. It replaces them with a single-box, converged backup and globally deduplicated storage, in one package.

Instead of storing big files on machines in the data center, Rubrik enables customers to back up the information digitally and put it to work. The company's data management product works across the various clouds and in servers on site to let businesses see how, where and by whom data is being used.

Rubrik is tailor made for enterprises that use apps and data stored across mixed environments that entails on-premises services and services in the public cloud. It provides a way to retrieve data from storage models in equally fast times.

Rapid innovation through seven major product releases, supporting 14 different physical, virtual and cloud platforms has contributed to our growth.

I want to drill into the value proposition that Rubrik offers its enterprise customers?Essentially, if you look at the data management today it includes the data backup and recovery, disaster recovery and data archiving. The product and technology that enterprises needed for all of this require them to buy 3-4 types of hardware and software technology to put the solution together and connect to the public cloud. All the technology that they were buying was not native to the cloud. As a result, they could not leverage the native cloud architecture.

Rubrik collapses these different components of data management including backup software, application software, storage target media servers including, proxy servers into a single software solution that we package as an appliance for the on premises and sell for native cloud applications. It’s a single software fabric for businesses to manage their data on-premise as well as in the cloud. It helps CIOs simplify the backup and recovery infrastructure which is a massive challenge. CIOs today want to reduce the on-premise infrastructure and manage more of the public cloud and secure the whole environment and Rubrik helps in all these three areas.

The unique value proposition of Rubrik is the simplicity of the solution. Instead of buying 4-5 different pieces of hardware and software technology you can just invest in Rubrik. Simplicity and cloud-native capabilities are our greatest strengths.

If you look at the cloud model pushing data in the cloud is free, keeping data on the cloud is relatively cheap but pulling data back from the cloud is where the high costs are involved. Rubrik data management in the cloud creates a full index of every data in the cloud so if users want they can pull a single file out of large application thereby avoiding the cost of a large data transfer pack from the cloud so essentially Rubrik allows customers to push an ice block into the cloud and pull an ice cube out of it.

Rubrik automates discovery of your virtualized and physical environment, such as VMs, databases, and file sets, for easy and quick setup. It provides ease-of- use as you can set backup, replication, archival and cloud orchestration policies through Rubrik’s intelligent SLA policy engine. Manage data through a single HTML-5 interface across data centers and clouds. It helps enterprises reduce RTOs from hours to just minutes. Do recovery testing in just minutes. Out global search provides instant granular accessibility of data, whether it’s on the appliance or in the cloud. Our customers have cut their TCO in half. Customers typically achieve immediate 30-50% CapEx savings by eliminating hardware and software. Management simplicity amplifies savings over time while freeing resources up for innovation.

We have the ability to create on-demand visualization reports of all your data across the enterprise and the ability to create data automation orchestration with a single software fabric. Rubrik Envision allows enterprises to create, customize, and share platform analytics on consumption, compliance, and more, across a multi-cloud environment.

Our goal is that wherever you run your applications whether it is on-premise, in your data center or if you want to leverage the public cloud Rubrik provides you a solution to holistically manage your data wherever your application runs.

Deployments across multiple clouds and on-premise services are very much the norm for many businesses, with more than 80 percent of all organizations opting for hybrid solutions that incorporate their legacy systems as well as newer platforms. Now, Rubrik can run directly on AWS and Azure cloud platforms so enterprises that run apps or store data on these platforms can now run Rubrik in the cloud to index, back up and recover everything.

Can you share some examples to show how enterprise customers are leveraging Rubrik?JLL, a Fortune 500 professional services and investment management firm, deployed multiple Rubrik Converged Data Management appliances to deliver backup, recovery and replication for its production environment

After being hit by a ransomware attack, Langs Building Supplies, a leading supplier of timber products in Australia, was able to thwart the threat and restore its data without paying a ransom thanks to Rubrik;

Balance Innovations delivers a cloud service platform to help retailers transform their currency operations, and Rubrik helps keep them at the forefront of retail with a flexible and scalable cloud data management platform.

I am interested in understanding the competitive landscape in which Rubrik operates.

Enterprise data management is a $ 50 billion market. Our prominent competitors in the area of enterprise backup services include EMC, CommVault, and Veritas. We are targeting our new generation cloud-native backup and recovery software to replace older products from these industry rivals.

We have an architectural edge. Our product is built with the cloud in mind. This is where our traditional competitors lag behind because their products are not cloud native. They have only been acquiring companies to add on cloud capabilities. We offer efficiency, economics, streamlining of operations and instant data recovery. Our competitors cannot deliver such capabilities.

But we believe that we have a unique technology which is tailor-made for this market. Our ability to create a single software fabric is the direct result of the core infrastructure platform that we have built in Rubrik. We are continuing to accelerate the features of our platform as we are addressing large swathes of the market.

We have a core architectural advantage where we secure your data in a seamless manner whether it is at rest, on premise on in flight to the cloud. Your data is secured everywhere. We have built APIs for the third party tools to interact with Rubrik.

Can you give us a sense of business opportunities in the Indian market?We are investing in India as a central part of our expansion policy. Two months ago, we got Ashish Gupta on board to head of our India operations. Ashish brings 20 years of technology experience split across the US and India. He was most recently VP of Engineering at Flipkart where he founded the Retail Technology group helping drive revenue growth from $50 million/year to $1 billion/year in 5 years.

Previously, Ashish built and led the India R&amp;D Center for Firetide, a Silicon Valley-based wireless startup.

We started the India operations mainly to look at the commercial business in India as well as tap into the product engineering talent and build a core product development center to create a product for the global market to complement the Rubrik product portfolio as we scale the company.

We want to accelerate efforts in product engineering and sales. The India development center of Rubrik under Ashish Gupta's leadership will focus on Multi-cloud Workload Protection and Portability, Disaster Recovery, and Predictive Failure Detection.

Currently, we have 12- strong team in India but we aim to double the number in a month’s time. We want to invest $50 million over the next 2-3 years. We are committed to building our engineering and product development center in India. We want to create new products and IPs from India.

We want to learn from Indian CIOs in terms of the unique challenges they are facing as they help their business grow. We want to create solutions and products for them.

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